Our Daily Trailer: LEMORA: A CHILD’S TALE OF THE SUPERNATURAL

This trailer is actually newly created for Brooklyn's Spectacle Theater, which is screening the film as part of its SPEC2BER series this month. But I quite like the trailer, cut nearly 40 years after the film was released. Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural (alternatively titled Lemora: The Lady Dracula and The Legendary Curse of Lemora) is a drifting, mysterious, illusory film, and this trailer captures that nicely, not drowning any of the otherworldly weirdness in prosaic trailer voice-overs.

Little Lila Lee, a gangster's daughter and church singer, flees from the Lord's house where she has been raised by the Reverend (played by the film's director Richard Blackburn), in order to visit her father before he dies. She finds her way to the nightmarish Deep South town of Astaroth, where she discovers her father among a crowd of vampires - some mutated and monstrous, some beautiful. And none are more beautiful than Lemora, the mysterious vampire queen who has become alarmingly preoccupied with little Lila Lee.

Lemora had some controversy surrounding its release due to the lesbian predatory tendencies of that queen vamp, but the movie's actually remarkably tame. It's beautiful and strange and totally PG. Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith plays Lila, and she's really wonderful in the film, giving a lovely, gossamer-soft performance. Smith later began to build a name for herself as something of a scream queen and then joined the band The Runaways, but her career unfortunately faltered after two decades of heroin addiction. She passed away in 2002 from hepatitis complications.

But we can always revisit her in Lemora, with her sweet, clear voice and dreamy eyes.